Pop Culture Saturday: AOL ... Never Had It, Never Will

Pop Culture Saturday is intended to be a more light-hearted look at American culture. There's much more going on in America than the darkness of Liberalism.

If you close your eyes and think the words "You've Got Mail!" you can probably hear that voice from AOL clear as a bell. You can now close your eyes and listen to that same voice say "We Have Failed!" Time Warner (the parent company of America Online) announced this week that they will be giving away e-mail accounts and software in a "strategy shift" likely to tick off some paying customers. The good news: We will NOT be receiving any more unsolicited "drink coasters" in the mail from AOL. The bad news: If you have AOL dial-up, you'll still be paying about $26 per month for service.

Broadband users will be getting AOL services for free. With these changes, AOL will be losing about $1 billion in annual revenue. There will undoubtedly be a number of job cuts in marketing and customer service. You should expect to reach somebody in India if you go looking for technical support. AOL is still calculating the payroll and network savings (but they will later add employee severance totals). Also, you should expect to be deluged with online advertisements - which is how Time Warner is going to make up for the lost revenue. I sure do feel good that I never hooked up with America Online!!

I've always thought that America Online was a misnomer. Some of the people using AOL are not in the continental United States. And I've always been computer-literate enough to manage my own connection - and that means not having to work through AOL's portal to get to the Internet. No, I don't use Internet Explorer either. Bottom line: The fall of AOL as we've known it provides a picture of the free enterprise system at work! With more people going to broadband, AOL should have converted its proprietary software to open source much earlier - but it took the loss of millions of customers to make this happen. Computer users voted with their dollars.

Jonathan Miller, AOL's chairman and chief executive, said the strategy shift would help AOL "maintain and deepen our relationship with many more members who are likely to migrate to broadband. Providing them with their familiar AOL software and e-mail for free, over any broadband connection, will be critical to our future success." The company is starting over - but it could have avoided a total overhaul by keeping a closer watch on the market and facing the brutal facts: No one (with the exception of the computer-illiterate) wants to pay for just a portal. Now they've got to provide it for free!